Lily Hibberd
Artist & Writer
About
Lily Hibberd is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working on questions around frontiers of time, memory and the cosmos. Her practice combines painting, writing, photography, sound, moving image, performance, and installation art. The resulting works have been presented in 68 international exhibitions, events and festivals.
Our interplanetary connection with Venus has been the focus of the past four years of Lily’s creative research and archival investigation. She is also working with artists, curators and scientists on Venus Conversations 2024-2034.
Lily is founding editor of the art writing publication un Magazine (2004), co-founder of Parragirls Memory Project (2012), and author and co-author of artist texts and academic books and articles. She holds a PhD by research practice and is a researcher at Université Paris Cité.
Themes
Current Work
Venus Rising
Venus is our closest planetary neighbour yet it is overlooked as a scientific, celestial and cultural object. “Venus Rising” is an interdisciplinary speculation that embraces Venus as a way to appreciate our interplanetary existence. The machine vision of our veiled twin is examined through more than a 150 paintings of the surface of Venus from NASA radar data, in a video and an artist book titled "Venus sees Earth", as well as a sculpture series embodying occlusions in Venus radar datasets.
View of selected paintings from “Venus Rising”, 2025.
Venus Sees Earth
A Time Atlas in Reverse
Venus has observed Earth over billions of years. In the eyes of our twin planet, we have evolved in parallel, and we are bound together both geologically and in shared interplanetary consciousness. Venus recounts this history in reverse starting from our common origins in the birth of the Solar System. This artist book tells its story through an atlas of astronomical images of Earth seen by Venus. On their voyage through the Solar System, these images look back at Earth, echoing Walter Benjamin’s 'Angel of History’.
Venus Conversations 2024–2034
Launched at the Science Museum in November 2024, Venus Conversations is a series of dialogues and art projects launching from the planet Venus to explore cultural, scientific and artistic forcefields. This decade-long project is engaging creative and scientific communities to reimagine our relationship with this overlooked planet, organised in collaboration with French art critic and independent curator Annick Bureaud and Austrian art-science curator and scholar Claudia Schnugg. Visit the webpage for details.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principle arts investment and advisory body
Exhibitions & news
Éclipse […] Diaphane, still from digital video, Lily Hibberd, 2015.
Éclipse [...] Diaphane in "SPACE: Internal Illuminations" at Fotografiska Museum, Shanghai from 12 November 2025 to 8 March 2026.
New book out in December 2025! Deep Fakes: A Critical Lexicon for Digital Museology, with Sarah Kenderdine, published by Taylor & Francis.
Venusian Rover touring in “Cosmos Archaeology: Explorations in Time and Space” at the National Museum of China in Beijing until 12 October 2025.
The Venus Project features in the book "Space Feminisms: People, Planets, Power", edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum.
Venusian Rover, in "Cosmos Archaeology: Explorations in Time and Space", National Museum of China, Beijing
Contact
lilyhibberdstudio [insert@] pm.me
